The Jewish World in the Middle Ages

Guided Tour for Adults

This tour provides visitors with an insight into the living conditions of Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages.

The families of Jewish traveling salesmen had settled along the main trading routes along the Rhine River. The Jewish communities that formed in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz became significant centers of Jewish cultural and spiritual life in this period. This tour through the Middle Ages investigates the political and social circumstances of life in this era within the context of the Jewish community, which revolved around the synagogue, the bath house, the Torah academy, the communal bread oven, dance halls, and inns. On the threshold of the Early Modern Era, Jewish experience was marked by pogroms, oppression, and displacement, which shaped daily life and religious practice in the area comprising today's Germany.